creative technology

Richard Stallman airs his views

The founder of the Free Software Foundation and the man behind the GNU project, Richard Stallman has strong views about free software.

Here are the excerpts from this interview:-

“Free software is a matter of freedom, not price”;

“Belief that software can’t be free is false”;

“There’s no incompatibility between capitalism and free software”;

“Free software combines capitalist, socialist and anarchist ideas”;

“If the user doesn’t control the program, the program controls the user”;

“Proprietary software often has malicious features”;

“Freedom means no one can control you”;

“Governments should use free software for the sake of sovereignty”;

“Steve Jobs designed computers that are stylish and chic prisons for their users”;

“I reject the assumption that governments should have more power”;

“Hacking is playful cleverness”;

“We shouldn’t confuse hacking with cracking computer security”;

“Empirical evidence shows that free software is more secure than proprietary code”;

“Facebook undertakes systematic surveillance of its users”;

I respect this man very much, and a lot of what he says makes sense. He recommends sacrifice in order to preserve one’s freedom. I use open source software but yet Stallman says that the open source movement has rejected his ideas. Stallman does not use Facebook, credit cards, mobile phones and any Apple products because he claims they infringe on one’s freedom.

Giving up these things is a lot of ask of the average person. I guess I just have to leave it as food for thought for now.